Folk Tales and Frost Bite – Two TV Shows on Amazon Prime
...seen on Amazon Prime
The Amazon original show Lore is adapted from a podcast of the same name – a sort of “strange but true!” collection of gothic folk tales and urban legends, but for the NPR set. In the podcast, the creepiness always felt undercut by narrator and creator Aaron Mankhe’s halting, affected cadence (“I’m Aaron Mankhe. And this is Lore”), as well as by his tendency to fill airtime with platitudes about man’s fascination with the macabre. The result was a program that strayed dangerously close to pretentious and never quite delivered on its promised chills.
The Amazon show stays 99% true to the formula. Mankhe still narrates every episode in a style that appears to aim for the intimacy of talk – “well” and “you see” sprinkled here and there – yet winds up sounding more like a written approximation of the spoken word. And just when you think he’s about to shatter your disbelief and leave you quivering under your sheets wondering if the Wolfman might be prowling outside your window, Mankhe stops short, acknowledging that of course the stories aren’t real; but isn’t it interesting that we find them scary? Far from being “disturbingly effective” as The Verge (who else?) claims, you could get a bigger chill in half the time by reading a Wikipedia page on the same subject.
And the show really does run a bit long. The podcast came in at around 20 minutes. The TV show tacks on an additional 20. Unfortunately, the extra time does not add more depth to the lore itself but is instead used for re-enactments. Surprisingly, these are really the best part of the show. They are well acted and well shot. We find none of the out-of-focus, grainy footage or the jerky, cheap-looking slow motion that a similar show on basic cable might employ.
Still, form can only take you so far. And no amount high production value or highfalutin waxing to the tune of “perhaps the reason we find mental illness so terrifying is that it represents a dark side of ourselves” can turn what is essentially a Ripley’s Believe it or Not! for snobs into a worthy historical documentary series.
***
Nor can exotic Icelandic dialogue and English subtitles turn Trapped – a rather blah snow mystery – into a frosty thriller.
Trapped is an Icelandic show acquired by Weinstein TV for stateside distribution. The reason for the acquisition appears to be a bet on America’s appetite for sleet. Watching the show’s characters attempt to solve a murder in the black sludge of a Nordic winter’s day, we couldn’t help but make a mental note to salt the driveway. If bad weather is your thing, you might just give Trapped a chance.
The setting is a small, isolated village on the Icelandic coast that also happens to be a port of entry for a ferry from Denmark, which is apparently a country populated entirely by brutish, proud louts who have no interest in even tempered behavior or neighborliness or not murdering other people – something the Icelanders deem quite uncouth.
And boy are the Icelanders couth. We are introduced to our main protagonist, a local police chief who lives with his elementary school-age daughter and his ex-wife’s parents in some sort of multi-generational dwelling Scandinavian fantasy. When his ex-wife shows up with her new boyfriend, he even lectures his daughter to be polite to the man, allowing himself only a light tap on steering wheel to vent all that awfully outdated male aggression.
But like all fantasies, there’s a dark undercurrent here. Fishermen have found a human torso floating in the wake of a ferry that has just arrived in port.
Typical Danes. Or is the perp Lithuanian? Or – one dare not say it out loud – a fellow Icelander?
You’ll have to watch to find out. We won’t bother getting further into the plot here since it would require recalling character names that all sound like premium yoghurt brands. We’ll say merely that the mystery itself is of the plain variety. Aside from the weather and the exotic language there is little to set Trapped apart from a cable network mystery. But for fans of frost bitten landscapes, the show surely delivers in heaps.